GFF Reviews

Author: gffreviews

  • Re-cycle

    Re-cycle is a Polish short animated film about a man in a post-apocalyptic world of darkness and howling wind, who cycles relentlessly on his bike to charge up what little power he can to run the radio playing his dead wife’s voice singing. Grim as fuck.

    With no dialogue, it manages to tell a full story in 6 minutes. The man is a champion cyclist, his wife was an opera singer. Whatever has happened to the world has resulted in tumultuous wind, and her room, with her posters still on the walls, has blown open in a scene of destruction.

    What once was a city now lies in ruins, as the man plunges over again into his task, to power the generator for some brief moments of relief, the bright light in his kitchen, to boil the kettle for a morning coffee, and to hear his wife’s voice singing. This desperate need to retrieve the past consumes all his present in a world with no future.

  • Ziyara

    I have no faith, but I was greeting within the first 5 minutes of this film. With all the films I’ve watched lately, where difference is a divide, difference is a source of conflict, it moved me to tears to watch a film where difference is neighbourhood, difference is valued, difference makes us all richer.

    Ziyara is pilgrimage to the resting places of saints. In Judaism, this means people, rabbis and scholars, who were close to God. Morocca is scattered with holy sites, selpulchres of the devout. But since the mass emigration of Moroccan Jews to Israel after its founding, these places are almost exclusively taken care of by the Muslims there.

    It honestly brought me to tears to see the level of care and reverence with which these sites are treated. The Muslim caretakers look after these places with such attention to detail and respect. Everything is kept not just clean, but *spotless*. One cemetery guardian taught herself Hebrew so she could catalogue the gravestones and keep the heritage for anyone who comes back to find it.

    And it is not simply religious sites which are preserved. One shopkeeper, whose father took over the shop of a Jewish family after they left, has kept the mezuzah by the shop door, and by his counter. He would never think of doing anything else, he says, everything that contains the word of God is holy. Others say the same, that Jews, Christians, Muslims, are cousins of the one family, and they miss the presence of Jews in their communities like you would miss family.

    Everywhere they go, they meet with kindness. And I almost cried harder at that than I have at the other films showing such sorrow. Because it is such an overlooked blessing, the simple kindness of others. And in a world where we are so wary and constantly expecting to meet the worst, kindness is just a rare and resurrecting balm.

    The filmmaker visits old synagogues, where the Muslim caretaker has the keys, comes in to keep and maintain the place, and knows the traditions inside and out. In one synagogue with only a dwindling congregation of two dozen or so Jews, they ask the caretaker why he has kept 5 torahs here. “Because,” he says, “if they were sent away to a museum, how would we even know Jews were here?” The torahs remain for anyone who might come looking for the past, and somewhere in a small hope that one day their Jewish neighbours will return.

    In the Casablanca Jewish museum, the Muslim curator shows the filmmaker the ancient torahs. With white gloves, treated with the utmost preciousness and respect, she unrolls the carefully conserved scrolls. Before placing them back in their enclave, she redresses them, first in a simple white cloth, then tying them with a sash, and wrapping it in a jacket of green and gold. She could not have been more tender if she was dressing a newborn babe. She says to the filmmaker, “I’ve never told anyone this before, but before I touch the torah, I say,” Bismillah”. ” Meaning ‘in the name of God’.

    The detail of the history which is kept is extraordinary. Where the Jewish quarter was abandoned, and the homes fell into ruin due to the weather, Muslim guides can still tell any visitors which house belonged to who, the names of the residents, who was their rabbi. It is just incredible.

    I gret throughout this movie, it was just so moving. An affirmation of the everyday miracle of human kindness and the brotherhood of man.

    To the emigre Jews of Morocco, your neighbours miss you.

  • Tuning

    God, this made me wanna learn how to play the piano.

    My dad used to say, when you see someone play an instrument, it’s like they can make magic in their hands. It’s very true, and it never seems to get old.

    Tuning is the kind of documentary I love, one that invites you sit, stay, and watch for while. Look out at the world there is around you. It is 50 minutes focused on the piano in Central Station in Tel Aviv.

    You know the piano under the big clock in Central Station here in Glasgow? It’s like that. And sitting and watching it for an hour, you get to see all the life of the city go past. The older lady who comes over to sing to the young guy’s tune. The lovers who can barely get through the song without snogging. The workie putting up signs before opening, who sits down and belts out this amazing piece. Just incredible.

    But fuck, there’s a lot of soldiers kicking about. It makes you realise, that must just be normal there, for every third person to be in uniform. No one bats a eyelid, but I’d find that really alarming, all these folk cutting about in khaki, their cudgel and their bunnet stuck under their shoulder strap.

    And the music is so great. Classics known the world over, ragtime, rap, recognisable chart hits, and Israeli songs I was less familiar with. Some of the songs are so moving and so well performed. It’s amazing the level of talent that just passes by you on a daily basis.

    After the past year, with all the madness, treat yourself to 50 minutes to sit down and simply see the world. It’s lovely.

  • A Radiant Girl

    This is a wonderful and warm film about Irene, a 16-year-old girl, bursting with life, who is practicing for her audition to get into drama college. A Radiant Girl follows her as she annoys her brother, has her first crush, shares her secrets with her grandma, and embarks on the journey into the bright world of adulthood.

    When you first see Irene, you can tell that the clothes are old-fashioned but your mind doesn’t immediately place the time. They don’t lean into being a period drama, showing it more as a family story with Irene at the heart. The buildings and settings all seem familiar, and nothing strikes you as the alien past.

    So you are in quite a bit, having watched her run her lines with her friends, bam up her brother, and talk with her grandma about boys, when you hear her dad say, “Bring me the ID cards, they need updated with a new stamp”, and you realise it’s the 1940s and they’re Jews. Oh.

    A Radiant Girl is about the life of a girl, not the death. It is a very warm and joyful story on one hand, but also a respectful attempt to show and celebrate the life of someone who might otherwise only be known for what was done to them.

    Irene is a force of nature, fearless, energetic, full of love and life. She is playful, cheeky, and has youth’s intensity. She winds up her brother but is fiercely loyal and loving to him at the same time. She can always cheer up her worry-wart father. And she and her grandmother share the same rebellious spirit, keeping each other alive with gossip and excitement.

    The other, the antisemitism, comes in so stealthily and suddenly, and in such weird and bureaucratic ways. And while it is shit, to Irene it has nothing to do with her, or her world, or her plans. It is not a new thing for Jews to face discrimination, be made to jump through legal loopholes. A stamp on a card, and eventually a badge on a jacket, is an irksome but not unprecedented event. Antisemitism has existed in societies for centuries, and though it ebbs and flows, people survive. What we know is to come seems impossible from where Irene stands.

    A Radiant Girl is a wonderful film which asks us to celebrate the life of one girl, to share her joys, her hopes, her dreams. To laugh with her and her family, to sigh with her first love’s kiss, and to rejoice in her achievements with her friends and schoolmates. And not let the darkness eclipse her story, but let her take centrestage in her life. A magnificent film.

  • Summer Light

    This is such a Sunday afternoon movie. Lying on your granny’s carpet listening to her tell you what everyone on screen died of.

    Summer Light reminds me of nothing so much as an episode of Frasier. There’s everyone chasing each other, a ludicrous and precarious party, and disaster always looming. While ostensibly a romantic drama, it has enough helpings of comic relief that it’s not far off.

    It is about Michele, a beautiful and innocent young woman who comes to meet her lover in a hillside bed and breakfast in Provence. There she learns lessons in love that will leave her older and more cautious.

    Obvious cad, and full-on no-righty, Patrice catches sight of her, and marks her for his next conquest. His last one is Cricri, who runs the hotel, but he has since grown bored with her.

    Cricri is half mad with jealousy, knowing full well that Patrice no longer cares for her, and has his eye on the younger woman, but he gaslights her and manipulates her until she is unsure where to focus her rage. She alone knows what Patrice is capable of though. She covered for him when he murdered his wife, believing him to have done it for love of her. She also nursed him when he was mentally unwell after the death. Now he is back on his feet, he is done with her.

    Patrice’s seduction doesn’t go as planned though. Michele is devoted to her lover Roland, who she seems to have met during a creative manic streak, and is now getting to know on his way down, into despair and alcoholism. Working in the theatre and being three sheets to the wind, Roland is ostentatiously melodramatic, playing the tortured artist. But sincerely he begs Michele to leave him, knowing he will pull her down in his spiral of self-destruction too.

    The other innocent in this is Julien. He works on the nearby dam, and only comes across this shower of upper-class shambles by stopping by the hotel on his way to work one night, and accidentally walking into Michele’s room. In the darkness, she kisses him passionately, believing him to be Roland. From the first kiss, Julien falls in love with her.

    The film follows Michele as Patrice draws her ever closer in a web of falsehood and ill-intent. He encourages Roland’s drinking, leaving Michele despondent and disillusioned with love. All the while Cricri tries to warn Michele and regain Patrice’s affection, a dual purpose which leaves her with no credibility. And what will Patrice do when finds the lowly Julien is a rival?

    All this culminates on the night of the masquerade ball at Patrice’s mansion. Will Michele be seduced by his machinations? Will the fair Julien win her love? Will she bring herself to leave the drunken Roland? And what will happen when Cricri makes clear just what Patrice is capable of to get what he wants?

  • Thou Shalt Not Hate

    Thou Shalt Not Hate is about an Italian doctor, son of a Holocaust survivor, whose path crosses with a family of neo-Nazis. It is a film about how we deal with the inheritance of hate, and what we might be willing to sacrifice to see the cycle end.

    Simone is a dashing, middle-aged doctor, who is mourning the recent death of his father, with whom he had a very complicated relationship. He unexpectedly is the sole witness a hit and run, and begins to attend to the victim. But as he finds the man to be covered in swastika tattoos, he stops, stands back, and simply waits for the ambulance to arrive. The victim dies, bleeding out.

    Simone struggles with guilt over the coming days, and looks up the guy’s family. He has a daughter in her 20s who has returned to care for her brothers, one a teenager, one just a child. They are broke and scrambling to make ends meet. So when the daughter, Marica, starts working as a cleaner, Simone hires her to do his flat.

    What starts off as a wary and tentative act of amends, deepens into something more real. Despite violent resistance from Marica’s teenage brother, this seemingly uncrossable divide begins to shrink with humanising interaction.

    Thou Shalt Not Hate is not a fairytale of resolution but a drama about how we make hate one step at a time, and how we can unmake it the same way. There are no guarantees, the effects carry on across generations, and there will never be a final victory or final defeat, but every choice makes a difference, and every choice is in our power to make.

  • France

    Overlong and tedious film. It focuses on France de Meurs, a tv personality who starts taking crying jags. France is a rich, privileged, white woman who has everything, but is still somehow sad. It’s the Anna Karenina conundrum. And I give zero fucks.

    There is barely the wisp of a plot to this. Whole scenes effectively repeat themselves in different settings. There are, hm, maybe 4 or 5 hundred shots of France just staring silently directly into the camera while tears roll down her cheeks. The camerawork is so lazy, there’s nothing to even keep your attention visually. There will be the same three types of shots just used over and over again. And towards the end, when we get something which might be considered a dramatic incident, it is so OTT that people in the cinema were actually laughing. It was like a cartoon. I actually wanted to take a red pen to this film and scrawl over it, “What is the point of this shot? What does it give the audience that they don’t already have?”

    There is no character development. It’s hard to even describe France as a character. She doesn’t do anything but cry and have an apartment that looks like if Liberace ran a museum.

    One good thing I will say about it is the costume design was on point. I feel like the costume department had a clearer idea of who this character was than the writer, director, or the audience.

    An absolute waste of time.

  • The Divide

    Set almost entirely within an A&E on a night of Yellow Vest protests, The Divide follows the collision of a number of characters as tensions run high. Reminiscent of something like Clash, the political situation in France is boiled down to this one place.

    There are four main characters, a lesbian couple on the verge of breaking up, a Yellow Vest protestor, and a nurse who is at her wit’s end trying to meet the needs that are far outstripping the hospital’s ability to provide. There are only a few establishing scenes before entering the A&E, introducing Raphaelle and Julie.

    Julie is leaving her wife, and you understand why after 5 minutes of sharing the screen with her. She’s narcissistic, relentless, and thoroughly obnoxious. She goes down on her elbow in the street, after following and continuing to argue with Julie after she’s been clear and explicit about wanting to drop the subject because her decision’s been made. She then tries to leverage her injury to make Julie stay with her, if only for the evening at the hospital.

    The other short scenes before we enter the A&E are of Yann, a truck driver, sick of insecure employment, shit wages, and being unable to support himself, who has come to protest in a march down the Champs-Elysee towards the presidential palace. Yann is passionate, pissed off, and hopelessly naïve about what to expect. He’s actually enjoying himself and having a laugh, he offers the riot cops a smoke and asks them to join the protest, since it’s their shit wages and pensions too. He seems genuinely surprised when they respond with tear gas and grenades.

    So you have an A&E full of the usual night’s falls and scrapes, the Yellow Vests pouring in injured, and the hospital understaffed and struggling to hold it together. The hospital staff themselves have been out on strike, with signs on the walls saying, “Overworked staff = patient safety”. Yann tells them they should be out protesting with him, they ask who would be here to treat folk like him if they did that.

    At first the film is somewhat buoyant, even funny at times. Yann tries to rally support for the protests from people in the waiting room who are just exhausted, hungry, and sore. Raf throws a fit like a toddler every time Julie leaves her side. Together they end up bickering, and are generally the kind of nightmare patients hospital staff dread.

    But as the night wears on, tensions ramp up. It’s obvious the nurses don’t have enough staff to cope, people are waiting for hours to be seen by a doctor, and it’s only a matter of time before something gets missed. And then the police show up and make everything worse. Classic.

    The Divide shows the effects of the public sector cuts, while simultaneously showing the violence of the repression of those trying to oppose them. It puts a face on the long waits, the exhausted staff, and traces the impacts that get hidden among the stats – not catching a problem in time, leaving vulnerable patients alone for hours on end, having problems escalate when they could be avoided altogether with timely and effective first treatment.

    The Divide in the film stands for many things, for Raf and Julie’s breakup, for their separation from their son who is also demonstrating in these matches, for the haves and have-nots in France. Whether it is class, politics, love or power, The Divide shows a deeply fractured society that is struggling to unite even behind the basic fight to survive.

  • Lingui, The Sacred Bonds

    Lingui, meaning The Sacred Bonds, is a film about a woman seeking an abortion for her daughter in Chad where it is illegal.

    A real feminist film about throwing off what’s been handed down from on high as the misogynistic status quo, and prioritising women’s wellbeing and relationships. Amina is a devout Muslim, going to mosque for every prayer, dressing modestly, and working hard turning old tyres into baskets. One day she finds out her only daughter, Maria, is pregnant.

    Amina is herself a single mother, having been deeply in love with, but abandoned by, Maria’s father. Castigated and thrown out on her own by her family, to Amina her daughter is her only family, and her world.

    So when she discovers her daughter is pregnant at 15, it’s like a nightmare come true, watching history repeat itself. At first she reacts like she’s been shown all her life, beating her daughter and scolding her for the shame she’s brought upon them. When Maria says she wants an abortion, Amina tells her it is forbidden in Islam.

    But when it looks like she might lose her daughter for good, Amina realises what’s really important. She puts everything she has into getting her daughter an abortion. Her top priority is safety, but there is a cost. So scrambling for money becomes a night-and-day endeavour, taking her to places she never thought she’d go.

    And in some ways, it changes her. Sometimes the worst happening is liberating. She finally stops putting all her strength and energy into winning at a game that is rigged against her from the start. When you finally let go off trying to live up to patriarchy’s impossible standards, it makes you realise how exhausted you’ve been this whole time.

    Amina starts smoking, and doesn’t bother covering her hair, or showing up to mosque. She still prays, you can see her, but she prays with her heart looking out towards God. In some ways, it’s a sincerer form of religiosity than she had before.

    Maria sees how much her mother is doing, to ensure she can get safe healthcare and return to school to study. Their relationship improves greatly, because they see their love for each other clearly. Amina is not trying to beat Maria down like she was, she is taking her daughter’s hand and liberating themselves together.

    A wonderful story of a mother-daughter relationship, and about the power of women supporting each other.

  • Hello World!

    Hello World is a beautiful little children’s film, mixing paper mache stop-gap animation with a traditional 2D animation, to bring to life the wildlife of a forest pond.

    Each animal starts off being born and discovering the world, the beaver, the pike, the dragonfly, the salamander, the owl, the bittern, the tortoise, the kingfisher, the bat. They try to figure out what they are and what the world is, what can be eaten and what might eat them. Each views themselves as the centre of their universe, and delights in finding a world so plentiful and resplendent.

    The animation style is just great, with you still able to read the text on the paper under the painting. The moon glows, and has typing across its face. It’s just lovely to see.

    A great film to get kids interested in ecology and the natural world.